Now available in select “HR supply stores”: IoT (Internet of Things), one of the five tools discussed in my latest POV – “The HR Power Tools 6-Pack for High-Impact Service Delivery.” Much like the double-edged sword nature of its companion power tools, IoT in workforce management can usher in unprecedented and significant business benefits, but only when the right capabilities are selected and potential risks and adverse outcomes are accounted for.
IoT is a process in which people, machines, and devices are connected to one another via a single network in order to automatically exchange data without any manual involvement. IoT can, for example:
track the productivity of workers in the field
confirm overall fitness or fatigue when relevant
assign tasks based on the nearest worker
tie scheduling real-time to customer flow
offer real-time training based on an employee’s time on job, credentials or performance
All of this sounds pretty compelling, but a couple words of caution. The first word: Volkswagen, whose engineers illegally programmed IoT-like software to sense when the car was being tested during an emissions inspection, which then activated more costly equipment that reduced emissions. This resulted in a roughly $3B fine this year. Additionally, IoT solutions will generate lots of new, often very valuable data related to people and how they perform their jobs, and not every HR Department is adequately staffed to handle the current explosion of people data or supported by data scientists.
Cause for Optimism with Early Adopters of IoT in HR
While not many HR Technology solution providers are occupying the IoT market category just yet, one company caught our attention: Triax Technologies, and specifically with their “spot- r” solution for companies with workers in the field, particularly on constructions sites. Certainly, accidents are more common there. My briefing from Triax’ COO Peter Schermerhorn enlightened me that U.S. construction companies pay out $1 billion annually for claims related to slips, trips or falls; that the construction industry pays more than twice the national average for workers’ compensation insurance; and that an estimated $7.2 billion in fraudulent workers’ compensation claims are filed annually in the U.S.
spot-r by Triax provides data-driven, real-time visibility into construction operations and safety incidents, leading to an improved safety culture on site and can result in reduced insurance costs. Automatic, geo-tagged “slip, trip, fall” alerts improve response time to accidents and record surrounding conditions (temperature, height, location of witnesses in the area, etc.), self-alert buttons empower construction workers to stop working due to unsafe conditions and alert supervisors to hazardous conditions, and high-decibel evacuation alerts are included in the mandatory wearable devices used on many of the company’s pilot projects with customers. Peter also offered a glimpse into the near future when the company’s sensors will be used in new ways to promote safety and visibility on the job site. Imagine knowing in real-time where your workers, equipment, machinery, and tools are onsite and how they’re interacting with each other.
Who said technology innovations related to HR and workforce management usually lag other business areas?
Bottom Line: As with all the other power tools (i.e., sophisticated capabilities) recently added to the HR practitioner tool belt, IoT’s potential to be a game-changer cannot be overstated, but neither can the surrounding considerations for avoiding possible misuse or sub-optimal deployment.
One of the things I’ve been at pains to convey is the critical link between digital transformation… and the role RPA plays it making so much of it possible. Digitally-driven organizations must create a Digital Underbelly to support the front office by automating manual processes, digitizing manual documents to create converged datasets, and embracing the cloud in a way that enables genuine scalability and security.
Organizations simply cannot be effective with a digital strategy without automating processes intelligently – forget all the hype around robotics and jobs going away, this is about making processes run digitally so smart organizations can grow their digital businesses and create new work and opportunities.
So click here to download my full session at the recent packed-out Blue Prism World in London town:
I was struck by the similarities between Global Business Services (GBS) and Empires after reading ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ by Noah Harari. He says:
“An Empire is a political order with two important characteristics. First, to qualify for that designation, you have to rule over a significant number of distinct peoples, each possessing a different cultural identity and a separate territory….Second, empires are characterized by flexible borders and a potentially unlimited appetite…”
These two characteristics of an empire are uncannily similar to Global Business Service (GBS) organizations. GBS is:
Multi-function. GBS organizations aim to deliver services across multiple business functions (aka distinct peoples with different identities) such as F&A, HR, IT, procurement etc. all under one organizational umbrella.
Multi-geography. GBS organizations also aim to deliver its services across all regions and countries (aka flexible boundaries) that a company operates in.
The basis of the creation of Empires and GBS also has similarity. For Empires, it is about basic unity of the entire world around a central ideology. For GBS, that ideology is around standardization, collaboration, and effectiveness.
This all becomes troubling when you realize that we all have a very negative connotation around the word “Imperialism”. We tend to associate wars, brutality, coercion, oppression, and so on when we talk about imperialism.
So, is GBS also this brutal? I think it depends on what lens you view it from:
People lens. GBS makes total sense if you are sitting in the corporate headquarters but will be a bitter pill to swallow if you are the one who loses your job because of what you and many others consider to be some corporate mumbo jumbo and the latest consultant gimmick
Time lens. It feels like an achievement in hindsight but it is really challenging during set-up. Have you thought why almost everyone describes their experience of setting up a GBS as ‘war stories with battle scars to prove it’? I’ve not met anyone who has told me that the journey was smooth and they did not meet any resistance.
Bottom-line: GBS will work as long as we keep people at the core, define our outcomes and keep an eye on the future
However, I don’t think there is any value in painting GBS as black or white. Like almost everything in life, it has shades of gray. The most important question is ‘how can we make it better?’ And I think this is where GBS organizations can learn from the rise and fall of Empires.
Lesson #1. Focusing on developing talent is at the crux. GBS is about people and will not succeed without buy-in from people. The tone from the top helps but cannot be the only driver for sustainable success. Phil’s recent rant on this subject is spot on – too many enterprises are obsessed with achieving a scalable operational backbone centered on technology, as opposed to talent
Lesson #2. Make sure you know what “success” looks like. Balancing efficiency with empathy is an important concept to keep in mind. Also, there is a diminishing return to efficiency improvements and cost reductions. After a certain point of time, it really does not matter. What matters is business outcomes and for that, you need motivated talent.
Lesson #3. All good things come to an end. Every empire eventually falls. GBS is the concept that we are all rallying behind in recent times, but you can be pretty sure we will come up with an even better framework for organizing ourselves to deliver work in future (such as the HfS framework, the Digital OneOfficeTM). The life expectancy of ideas is coming down dramatically, as we jumpS-curves in years not decades. So it is extremely important that we keep looking out at the future. Keep testing, keep piloting, keep investigating. This is how we at HfS Research are designing our future research agenda – but more on that later!
Disclaimer: I am a firm believer in the value and concept of GBS. My sole objective of this post is to make it more human.
Our industry requires a shift in mindset from providers, buyers, AND investors. We need to rethink shareholder value and the integral link it has with the very element it seems to be bent on eliminating – people. In a thought-provoking post, my colleague Phil Fersht called out the fact we are in the people elimination business, wondering how it got so bad. My take: there are two key aspects in this debate; the way we view talent and the (unintended) consequences of decades of shareholder value doctrine.
The importance of talent for the future of services
Buyers need to deal with their cost reduction obsession and recognize talent is still the differentiating factor for their business success – and will be for the foreseeable future. Domain expertise, talent, and local people are critical components of the value service providers produce. This is true in any industry, but for example in oil & gas and the utility industry, the service providers that are perceived as delivering the most value by buyers are those that invest in talent, local people with deep industry expertise, and innovation prowess. These folks are not the cheapest, but bring exponentially more insight and impact on results. Buyers have shared ample examples of service providers that help them tackle the sticky industry problems by bringing the talents of industry experts, data scientists, technology experts and the client’s domain experts together. This teaming leads to multidisciplinary cross-pollination to design and deliver solutions that combine technology, industrial process and ideas and proven concepts from other industries.
We are on the verge of a shift in the way we work, and the outcomes we produce
The future value delivered by the outsourcing industry won’t be people running the accounts payable process, but in knowledge-intensive, decision-rich processes. You need the talent to make the technology work effectively – to drive the results and business outcomes. If we again look at the oil and gas and utility industry, organizations are starting to recognize the talent they need to compete in the new economy aren’t smitten with the work and reputations of the oil & gas industry or utilities. The reality is that the competition for data scientists, for instance, is not Shell versus Exxon Mobil, but Exxon Mobil versus the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook and a host of start-ups. Service providers can offer more interesting career paths and are a source of talent that can plug the quantitative and qualitative skills gap these industries face. Long story short; focusing on talent, continuous education and business value creation is the viable path forward for service providers.
The creed of shareholder value and its disconnect from reality
Too many people are still worshipping the totem of shareholder value, a theoretic and flawed notion from its conception. We are in a slow transition to more stakeholder value focus, more fitting our interdependent world that needs more cohesion and inclusiveness.
Ever since the invention of the term shareholder value, it was adopted as the dominant discourse by Wall Street and institutional investors. It, among other factors, has led to a short-term, myopic circus that reduces the horizon of executives to 90 days, de-humanizing our enterprises. It’s a fact that we are richer than ever before and there is less sickness, famine, and war (you wouldn’t say it if you watch the news). But there are still large swaths of the world struggling to improve the standard of living. And even in the world’s richest countries, large groups of people don’t feel better off. They feel left behind, disenfranchised and powerless. This is about half the population in countries like the US, the UK and France, evidence Brexit, Trump and Marine Le Pen’s rise.
We need to go full circle on shareholder value Coming back to shareholder value; it’s time to go full circle. Take a minute to think who is behind the vast pools of capital institutional investors manage… It’s us, the people saving money for their pensions. Shareholder value is a construct that served the money managing industry well but forgot to look at the wider interests of the actual owners of the money…. those shareholders are also your employees. Shareholders are not the clever folks on Wall Street, they are the representatives of the ‘normal people’ in your neighborhood and your company, the people who save their money in a pension fund or 401k.
If you take a narrow interpretation of ‘fiduciary duty,’ you can get away with the fallacy that returns on investment is the only metric of interest. But what if you fail to let that money you invest create prosperity for the people you invest it for in their real life? If your addiction to dividends and higher share prices is ruining the jobs of your future beneficiaries? It is time to bring the financial economy and the real economy closer together.
We can’t ignore the externalities of business any longer. People elimination is one of the challenging externalities that is a short-term lever executive in our industry seem to see as the inevitable answer to competitive pressures and new technologies (RPA, AI).
The Bottom Line – Taking social responsibility seriously is a critical and foundational aspect of doing business anno 2017
Only ten years ago, when I was doing research about investment preferences of pension fund beneficiaries and their ability to influence pension fund investment policy, corporate social responsibility and socially responsible investing were a theoretic discussion, often painted as the domain of idealistic, money-hating tree huggers. Not anymore. Since the 2008 financial crisis, everyone understands CSR is a real thing, a source of durable value creation, competitive advantage and not a fad you only use as window dressing. CSR has come a long way since. It’s time for service providers and buyers, along with governments, to come up with credible policies to make sure talent is up for the new tasks at hand, to truly augment people with the new technologies instead of using this as an excuse for the next round of layoffs.
Remember when sourcing advisors has become the “new analysts” and dominated so many outsourcing discussions? Remember when it was the norm for clients to bring in the sourcing specialists whenever they needed a deal done, not only to get a good price, but also to make sure they selected the right partner and had a strategic view of the future? Remember when most advisors were not only contract experts, they were also strategists, researchers, sounding boards and respected brands you could hang your hat on… Just look at our 2011 study when advisors lorded the influence over everyone bar direct peer feedback:
Fast forward to today, with all the sourcing advisors doubling-down in RPA to compensate for the drying up outsourcing deals and confidently hoping their outsourcing clients will immediately turn to them to help them grapple with the new outsourcing-cum-automation model. Surely their ability to craft deals for clients will put them in pole position to take their clients down the RPA path…
Let’s visit our brand new (still-in-the-field) study on the 2017 State of Automation, and it’s telling us a very different story when we spoke with 56 enterprises actually deploying RPA:
Less than half the RPA buyers view either consultants of sourcing advisors as influential in their automation sourcing. Even conferences are impacting automation buyers more.
So what’s gone so wrong with advisors in automation?
Credibility. Suddenly many advisors who were previously hawking their deep understanding of HCL versus TCS’s FTE rate cards are now suddenly adding their names to white papers on automation and trying to insert themselves into serious client conversations about said topic. It’s just not credible.
Smarter clients. The swirl of information over social channels is so intense these days that most clients’ knowledge isn’t that far behind the experts. In many cases, you’ll learn more about RPA talking with a client in beta mode than an advisor or analyst trying to impress you at a conference. That is why internal channels, such as procurement and plain old desk research is such an influence factor these days.
Archaic focus on headcount reduction. Just because you could create simple cases for headcount reduction with “take the people” outsourcing, doesn’t mean you can deploy the same draconian strategy to automation. Even the most clueless governance executive knows you can just fire people before you programmed some manual activities into a piece of software. Sure, there are serious productivity gain to be gleaned over time through the digitization of manual processes, but to tie this to immediate headcount takeout just doesn’t work.
Competition from service providers. For the first time, sourcing advisors and service providers are going head to head, and automation is the promoter of the fight. When clients want to understand RPA and a partner so help them roll it out, they need people who are in the game for the long haul, not a broker to dip in and out and get a deal done. Many of the sourcing advisors are just not transformation people – they are great at helping clients plan their outsourcing weddings, but marriage guidance councilors they truly are not. Service providers depend on long-term, complex and often messy relationships to keep them employed and busy… and RPA really fits the bill. While it poses significant threats to their margins over the long term, they cannot afford to be not playing in the automation game. What’s more, most the BPO service providers are rapidly running RPA in their own delivery organizations, which is giving them the experience and lower cost base to be effective.
The traditional consulting model doesn’t work with RPA. The advisors are struggling to scale up talent bases that can understand the technology and deal with the considerable change management tensions within their clients. RPA is murky and complex, and not something you can train bus loads of 28-year-old MBAs to master overnight. Meanwhile, we are seeing some advisors simply do some brokering of RPA software deals for small fees, only to make a hasty exit from the client as they do not have the expertise to roll-out effective implementation and change management programs.
RPA specialist consultants few and far between. Pure-play RPA advisors are explaining this is not quite so easy and requires a lot more of a centralized, concise strategy. There are simply not enough of these firms in the market, especially with Genfour having been snapped up recently by Accenture. With only a small handful of boutique specialists to go around, these firms can pick and choose their clients and command high rates. Quality RPA advisory boutiques, such as Symphony Ventures, are literally turning business away as they cannot scale fast enough to cope with the demand.
Advisors are not producing research. There’s a reason why procurement folks, analysts and simple desk work actually sit above advisors in the new data – clients want product specific benchmarks and real experienced advice that they are simply not getting from the advisors. All the advisors are putting out is the same of tired “drama” about robots replacing workers, and how to think “strategically” about RPA. While I like some of the stuff I see coming out of the likes of McKinsey, KPMG and EY, it’s just not giving me the real deal about which RPA vendor I need to be working with, how these tools truly stack up against each other and how I can actually build a bloodybot. That is why many clients are getting more reality from attending a conference than the lovely lunch they just got bought from their nice friendly consulting partner.
Turgid, hackneyed marketing doesn’t work anymore. Cheesy pictures of robots and the same endless stream of 300-foot view puff that sounds just like the last piece you read on LinkedIn by some weird dude who you can’t actually recall allowing into your network, isn’t helping matters. These advisors are relying on their brand and past reputation for credibility in a world where clients want to see some meat on the bones.
The Bottom-line: Advisors need a vastly different approach to automation to avoid complete irrelevance in this market
This industry has literally entered into a destructive war over automation, and the need for credible, independent and experienced advice has never been so in demand from customers. The skills to make automation a feasible profitable reality are few and far between, while greedy corporate leaders demand cost savings that simply are not achievable if their organizations fail to make the necessary investments and partnerships. Did companies become world class at HR overnight because they bought an expensive Workday subscription? Or stellar at sales and marketing because they slammed in a Salesforce suite? So why should they become amazing at cost-driven automation simply because they went and bought some licenses from an RPA vendor promising bot farms and virtual labor forces?
RPA and Intelligent Automation have sparked a major war in the worlds of outsourcing and operations, where many battles are being fought – and the winners will be those who are in this for the long haul, who can absorb some short-term pain in order to benefit from the larger spoils further down the road. While automation is killing outsourcing today – costing many people their jobs, their reputations and destroying the profitability of legacy engagements, those who can hunker down, focus on self-contained projects where they can fix one broken process at a time, can get stakeholders onside by demonstrating meaningful, impactful outcomes without major resource investments, will be the winners.
Advisors who can win out are those who can take their clients through this journey – one process chain at a time, evaluating all the right solutions and developing milestones that are realistic. Sadly the easy gigs where you could roll out of bed for a couple of million in billings are now extinct. The key is to play the long game, invest in the new skills you need to be truly credible in this market, and produce credible research that gets down and dirty in the weeds, not that 300 ft helicopter view that everyone’s heard over and over again…
Tired of the RPA hyperbole? Well, you’d better get used to it continuing, as key industries have already made significant short-medium term commitments:
Our 2017 State of Operations and Outsourcing study with KPMG, covering 454 major enterprises, shows the hi-tech and financial services industries leading the way with, respectively, 53% and 44% already making significant investments in RPA over the next couple of years. Only retail falls below 30%, which may be a result of highly distributed organizations finding it if challenging to find high-throughput, high-intensity process where there is real tangible ROI for the investment.
The Bottom-line: The more digital your firm need to be, the greater the onus on digitizing and automating your manual processes
Quite simply, you can’t be an effective digital organization if you don’t have your manual processes digitized and automated. That’s what RPA does. All software and hi-tech firms have to transact their services over digital channels, and most tend to be further along the change curve when it comes to automation. Net-net, hi-tech’s DNA is all about automation, so having a digitized back-end just fits with how they view the world. For banks, these companies are plagued by manual processes and many have taken the plunge in recent years with large RPA teams to help them meet compliance deadlines and standards – almost every major bank has an RPA story unfolding. Insurance is catching up too, especially those with archaic claims processing workflows. Moreover, many insurers were among the first to exploit offshoring over the last 10-15 years, and moving along an RPA path is a natural progression for many of them. Energy and utility firms are all about cost control these days, while healthcare orgs are among the most backward when it comes to legacy technology and process. As patient care moves into the digital era, the need to digitize those manual records has never been more dire.
However which way we look at it, RPA is on a major growth trajectory… our forecast may be too conservative, but we believe many organizations will be surprised at how much time it will take to get their act together to adopt RPA in the right way. However, the newbies should be able to learn from the pain of the early adopters to move along the RPA adoption cycle faster.
The pendulum is swinging back. Over the past year, we’ve seen the increasing focus from India-based service providers to invest in building on-shore presence and capability in the U.S. While spurred on by H-1B visa limitations and in-flight policies regarding minimum wage and the politics of “protectionism,” the long and short of it is that the U.S. citizens should benefit from local investments. U.S. governments and economic development entities are offering incentives for partnering with these service providers as they seek out “hubs” central to current and potential clients. Two recent examples are Indianapolis, Indiana with Infosys and Jacksonville, Florida with Genpact, where the cities offer tax incentives and colleges and universities can provide a talent pool.
It used to be “too expensive” for service providers to set up on-shore service delivery centers, but with the increasingly integrated and intelligent use of robotic process automation and cognitive computing and the motivation of politics and protectionism, this argument is fading. What is also relevant is when the partnership changes focus from outsourcing a task or point solution such as “collections” to business outcomes such as providing a better patient experience and increasing upfront payment (thereby reducing the need for collections), the service provider needs to be more integrated into the end-to-end process and business operation. That means having a local presence and interaction to provide relevance and create meaning and insight. (See “Recasting the patient billing experience” as an example).
Our research (see Exhibit) shows the there is a significant drop across the board in the move to “offshore” business and IT work – finance and accounting and HR, in particular. Case in point, we recently heard from a client about how Sutherland helped set up and recruit into a local service center for F&A services in a matter of a few months for a company that was separating from its parent.
Exhibit: Changing use of offshoring – shared services and outsourcing
Source: HfS Research in Conjunction with KPMG, “State of Operations and Outsourcing 2017” Sample: n=454 Enterprise Buyers
How service providers are expanding local, U.S.-based presence
Investments by service providers in having short- and long-term U.S-based capability for clients include local service delivery centers and increasing co-location delivery teams as well as work-from-home options; education support through curriculum development in local colleges and universities as well as programs for K-12 to “entice” and enable interest in STEM (e.g., code.org and Girls Who Code) to create the workforce of the future; and transitioning workforces from clients to their own organizations.
Examples include:
Genpact: In July, Genpact will add to its network of 12 U.S.-based service support and delivery centers by opening one in Jacksonville, Florida. This one will focus first on mortgage service support with processing, underwriting, and closing services for residential mortgage loans for a leading financial services institution
Infosys: A new entry into this discussion, Infosys has far outstripped other service providers in pursuing H-1B visas to date and is now refocusing on building local presence and brand recognition. Infosys intends to develop four locations in the U.S., centered in “client clusters” and focused on particular capability areas such as artificial intelligence, user experience, and enterprise cloud. Its approach is to partner with local colleges and universities and offer incentives such as investing in student tuition and curriculum development. Infosys is also preparing for more long-term needs by looking at ways to entice a broader interest in STEM. The first partnership in this effort is in Indianapolis, Indiana, the heart of the U.S.
Cognizant: Its recent acquisition of Health Care Services Corporation’s TMG Group adds Medicaid and Medicare support in offices in Texas and Pennsylvania. This move provides its clients access to more local resources – people with knowledge and depth in government health as well as infrastructure.
Bottom line: Indian-based service providers have been building near-shore and onshore presence for a few years now, but it takes on new meaning and significance now as the context changes – politics, the impact of technology, objectives for partnering, and changing priorities around the skill sets that are needed. As a service buyer or government, university or economic development organization, be creative and also take a long-term view as to how these service providers can funnel the investments they are increasingly willing to take to have value locally to grow their businesses.
HfS has just published its first HFS Blueprint Report: Microsoft Dynamics Services 2017. The report looks at the capabilities and vision of nine global Microsoft Dynamics service providers. As this report forms part of HfS’ SaaS services research, a small weighting was applied to the service provider’s specific experience in deploying the cloud products.
What are the Microsoft Dynamics cloud products?
That’s not an easy question to answer! We have traditionally looked at the services market for stand-alone SaaS products (Workday, Salesforce and SuccessFactors). The Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM products are different and can be deployed on-premise, on a private cloud, on a public cloud, or with a hybrid model. Many buyers love this because it gives them maximum flexibility and control which is future proof.
The majority of Microsoft Dynamics deployments have been on-premise, especially for the ERP products, which have also been more popular with mid-market buyers. The CRM cloud product, CRM Online, has been more popular in recent years with mid-sized and large enterprises alike. The new Dynamics 365 platform, launched in Q4 2016, delivers a combination of Microsoft Dynamics ERP, CRM, productivity, and other applications on the cloud. We expect this platform to be a key growth driver for the adoption of cloud in this market over the next few years.
So, which service providers stood out in this Blueprint?
We included leading, global Microsoft Dynamics service providers. They all have good experiences and have made impressive investments to grow this aspect of their service practice. All of the service providers were positioned either in the Winner’s Circle or High Performers category. Notable performances from the different providers include:
DXC Technology, which impressed with its overall experience in deploying Microsoft Dynamics.
Those with the best cloud experience in engagements were Accenture/Avanade, Capgemini, HCL (PowerObjects), IBM and KPMG.
Accenture/Avanade and KPMG also impressed with their investments in consultative tools and technologies.
DXC Technology, IBM, Infosys, Wipro and TCS particularly stood out for their industry sector tools investments.
So, where do we expect this market to be headed in the next few years?
As the Dynamics 365 platform gains momentum, we expect increased service opportunities across our Value Chain of consulting, implementation, management and optimization services. One of the biggest challenges service providers have is keeping up-to-date with Microsoft’s product developments and training consultants to meet increasing buyer demand. As with all SaaS service markets, key differentiators lie in the ability to hire, motivate and retain good talent to maintain client project continuity. Buyers are becoming increasingly selective of the specific team members on projects. Look out for notes detailing recommendations for service providers and buyers on the HfS research site soon.
Talent is still the most precious asset firms have and it needs to be nurtured as the real proponent of growth and success, not merely the fancy technologies that can automate workflows. Our technology and business services industry desperately needs a mindset shift – and one that requires a longer term view, than the next quarterly Wall St announcement. Whilst we are not the only guilty party here, our technology and business services industry is still rooted firmly in people capability, much more than technology and commodity products, hence the desperate need to correct course and avoid circling the drain…
I was interviewing with the Delhi branch of NPR the other day on the layoff paranoia engulfing the Indian IT industry, and it dawned on me just how inhuman our business has become. These are normal people who still view the world as one where employers have responsibilities to their employees, where people still care about the welfare of others, when you got up in the morning and went to a job that had a purpose and a future.
The poor interviewers simply couldn’t comprehend why major employers enjoying ~20% profit margins and continual 5-10% growth were so focused on making massive staff reductions. “Don’t these firms have a responsibility to their employees, Phil?” was the question. “Of course they don’t, it’s all about their shareholders” was my immediate hair-trigger response. Ugh – I suddenly felt ashamed of the business of which I was part.
We’re in the business of increasing profits for investors, not creating new business value from people
Is our sole purpose now simply to eliminate people? We spend a couple of decades displacing “expensive” workers because we could find less expensive able ones to do the job. Now we’re getting rid of them altogether just to keep the Buffetts and Elliotts happy? And why are we literally obsessing with labels to describe what we do: Digital, Machine Learning, Intelligent Operations, Robotic Process Automation… or my favorite “Digital Labor”.
Let’s be honest, what all these things really signify is “how to get work down without the need for people”. And how can you call something “Digital Labor” when the labor is no more… unless we start redefining RPA recording loops based on optical recognition software as “labor”. Maybe we need to revisit what labor actually is, according to Merriam-Webster:
Definition of Labor (Merriam-Webster):
“1) The human activity that provides the goods or services in an economy;
2) The services performed by workers for wages as distinguished from those rendered by entrepreneurs for profits.”
Correct me if I am completely losing my mind here, but we’re no longer in the business of promoting human activity to stimulate economies… we’re in the business of increasing profits for investors. Is there any way to dig ourselves out of this hole, or are we on an inexorable nosedive to the lowest common denominator of creating and promoting business operations that no longer require people?
As technology and operations professionals, we must rediscover our purpose or we’re just promoting the end of labor
I wish I had a silver bullet solution to help us take this dramatic U-turn, but sadly, all I can offer are some ideas on how we can re-humanize what we do:
Find meaningful work for our people to do – not just fire them. In the past, when most businesses had some excess staff capacity, there were always useful things for them to do – such as consulting and outsourcing firms deploying their benched consultants to work gratis with existing clients on special projects that could eventually lead to future business – or just make those clients happy. Why just fire them for the sake of it? Why not set aside some modest investments to use these people to grow the business and increase client satisfaction? Why do we have to operate on a “you pay for what you get” basis with clients today? With all the guff we hear about co-creation and co-innovation between clients and service partners, surely this is the time to invest in our staffing ranks to change the nature of partnerships and create more trusted and innovative work cultures? Why does everything always have to have easily-accounted dollar attached to it? Will extracting a few extra dollars, rupees and pounds from the bottom-line, just to reduce excess human capacity, really have a hugely beneficial impact in the medium term? Maybe we could have had a few of these recently redundant folks examine the potential security issues of an airline IT system going down, thus saving billions of dollars in lost productivity and brand impact? Did British Airways really make out, when it cut as many corners as it could, just to lay off some onshore IT staff?
Stop this inane drivel about digital, automation and machine learning and start focusing on proper business solutions. There, I said it. Sorry to be blunt, but why is almost every service provider and consultant subjecting us to the same sales pitch about how amazing they are at automating, digitizing the machine-learning the crap out of everything. I have found myself imprisoned at conferences with legacy outsourcing advisors, analysts and service providers – many of whom can barely spell “algorithm” – suddenly pretending they have been lifelong evangelists of these areas… And all these enterprise practitioners who subtly sneaked “RPA” into their job titles. Have we really become an industry of bullsh*tters and callous labor eliminators promoting this new wave of technology-driven human greed?
Enough! Any modern service provider with delivery credibility can fashion a framework to help orchestrate and implement all sorts of slick data-driven technology. Most advisors can probably help you kick the tires with an intelligent automation strategy and a selection of products to tinker with… and most enterprise side practitioners should (by now) be smart enough to work out if they can even start to adopt this stuff in their current environments.
Let’s just assume we can automate rudimentary manual processes and create meaningful machine learnings from data and text that is in some state of being legible to a series of algorithms. The technology is here today and we have the capability to take advantage of it. Let’s refocus the conversation on solving business problems and finding new opportunities and challenges together. Let’s talk about how we can help healthcare providers improve their patient satisfaction levels, or how banks can do a better job helping small businesses qualify for loans… or how retailers can better leverage Amazon and Alibaba to market and sell their products… Or how RPA providers can work with their partners clients to find value for their clients beyond sheer labor elimination. There are so many business needs to address, let’s raise the conversation to making business more successful, as opposed to simply whacking their staff.
Lobby governments to offer tax breaks to tech firms which increase their employee bases. This just has to happen. Companies need to be encouraged to add talent to their ranks, not slash it because they think they can. I sincerely hope Prime Minister Modi is in talks with India’s flagship IT services firms to fashion new tax incentives to have them invest in their staff – not simply resign themselves to satiating the whims of greedy investors. And President Trump – how about offering those promised tax breaks to US firms which invest in their people?
Raise our social responsibility brand as discerning employers. Let’s celebrate firms which grow through great people investments. Sure, we have to be smart about balancing the P&L, but those which can do it with real talent investments should be the beacons for us all to follow. Let’s highlight our talent successes and how great we are at investing in people to be great at what we do. No one is going to remember us for being amazing at automation, but they may remember us for creating a culture of collaboration and great service. People still buy from people and are (still) predominantly serviced by people, so let’s not lose sight of that.
The Bottom-line: The enterprise IT and business operations industry is venturing down a very dangerous path and we need to get off it – and fast.
We have to focus on helping clients find business value, not obsess with this labor elimination disease which has taken a stranglehold over our conversations. You can just sense we’re sinking into a new abyss of paranoia and negativity and we need to work hard and fast to pivot the discussion up a level, where the focus is on people and technology driven success, not simply a morass of algorithms designed to turn our firms into highly cost efficient transaction machines. Let’s get back to business and let the technology do its thing to enable it, instead of dominating it.
When an industry is enduring a secular shift that is literally redefining how we do work, it’s pretty important to get some real, unfettered dialog going among all the key stakeholders this impacts. We need to break free from the glitzy paid-for sales presentations, robot keyrings, stress balls, nasty logo-ed leather notepads and greedy events firms vying for a quick buck from vendors eager to part with cash to promote themselves to all their competitors.
That’s why we’re assembling 100 of the industry’s finest leaders in a single room for a whole afternoon to thrash out the mandate for the future of operations in the robotic age for our inaugural FORA council session in Chicago, 19th September. And we promise no sponsors, stress balls or bad white papers to take away…
Here’s just a sample of the industry robo dignitaries who’ve already committed:
Alastair Bathgate, CEO, Blue Prism
Chetan Dube, CEO, IPsoft
Chip Wagner, President, Emerging Business Services, ISG
Cliff Justice, Partner, US Leader, Cognitive Automation and Digital Labor, KPMG
David Poole, CEO, Symphony Ventures
Daniel Dines, CEO and Founder at UiPath
Jesus Mantas, Managing Partner and General Manager, IBM Business Consulting, IBM US
Lee Coulter, Chair for the IEEE Working Group on Standards in Intelligent Process Automation
Dr. Mary C. Lacity, Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Information Systems, UMSL, and Visiting Scholar MIT
Max Yankelevich, CEO, WorkFusion
Mihir Shukla, CEO, Automation Anywhere
Peter Lowes, Partner, and Head of Robotics & Cognitive Automation, Deloitte US
Shantanu Ghosh, SVP, CFO Services and Consulting, Genpact
Thomas Torlone, U.S. Leader of Enterprise Business Services, PwC
Tijl Vuyk, CEO and Founder, Redwood Software
Weston Jones, Global RPA Leader, EY
We also have leaders of cognitive and automation initiatives from the following buyside firms already signed up to get stuck into the debate:
So let’s cut to the chase – it’s time to have the real, hard conversation about where we really are as an industry. Why aren’t those 40% cost savings happening, each time someone slams in some software and hopes it somehow eliminates manual labor because they can access a bot library? In fact, why are a third of RPA pilots just left hanging with no result? Yes, people, it’s time to wake up and smell those robotic roses and have those really tough conversations about what is real, versus why so much of this stuff just isn’t working – and why we’re not putting together properly governed RPA rollout plans like we do with ERP software and SaaS platforms. Why are we making such a mess with this, when we could have so much to benefit from?
So join us in Chicago this September 19th for FORA the inaugural council meeting that finally debates the true Future of Operations in the Robotic Age
FORA is the very first industry council established to bring together buyside operations leaders, service providers leaders, expert advisers and technology developers to steer industry’s transition to the Digital OneOffice™.
FORA’s mission is to bring together the leadership from senior buyside operations leaders, service provider leadership, expert advisers, and technology developers to set the agenda for the transition to the Digital OneOffice™, and to develop an industry mandate for navigating and managing the creative destruction that looms. Supporting the FORA initiative is the IEEE’s Intelligent Process Automation Standards initiative that will encourage further research and investment, leading to powerful and attractive new service offerings. But the commercial frameworks needed to encourage and sustain wider deployment of these technologies are lagging because they fundamentally threaten established models.
In order to communicate the learnings from the FORA meetings, the group will produce a quarterly “FORA Mandate” that communicates core recommendations to the industry from the group meetings that will be held at quarterly HfS Summits.
So how can you get considered for Council Membership?
HfS will consider applications to the FORA Council based on seniority and relevance. Are you interested in participating? Just email us at [email protected].
This is a really important development as we consider the future of services and operations amidst all this creative disruption. I hope to greet many of you personally in Chicago this September.
